Lean intention is to deliver value to customers while promoting efficiency and eliminating waste in the process.

When you don’t know

Sometimes you might not even know what to improve. Feedback can come from customers input, waste, or simply a process you do everyday and you want to know how to improve it.

For startups, lean can be scary because that means your need truly produce a minimal product. In some cases, the product don’t even exist, and you just have to watch buyers intention by sending a ton of traffic to your website.

The fact is… lean methodology works well.

Going back to startups, the only way to know what people will buy is for them to actually buy it. Learn from other failures in the past, don’t make the same mistakes. Stop sinking your limited resources into something that won’t sell.

Instead, start building an audience and in the process you can find how scalable your business model is so you can become a “real” company. Giving your audience valuable free content will give you loads of useful insight into their problems and desires.

Lean any business following these simple steps

Start by creating a Value Stream Mapping to define your current state, the ideal state, and your achievable future state.

Step # 1 – Describe your current situation

A simple diagram of every step involved in the process you want to “lean” from the end to the beginning. That’s right, start with the last step. Doing this will help you get a better picture of how you flow is.

The goal is to identify all areas in which the flow is not smooth from process to process without interruption.

The flow of Materials.

The flow of Information.

The flow of the product through the processes.

Tips

Draw the map while walking the flow.

Walk the entire door-to-door process.

Gather new information. Do not rely on old data.

Step # 2 – Describe your ideal state

Now that you have a clear map of how yore process is, what is your ideal state without any restraints or constraints.

Later in your future state you will have opportunities for improvement identified in your current situation.

Identify the 8 types waste in current processes

The purpose of the value stream mapping is to identify and reduce waste in current processes. If you have idle time, inventory, no continuous flow, you have waste.